Week 15 - Open Food Facts and Presentations

Presentations

My group and I presented our presentations to the class this week. Initially I was extremely nervous as I have a tough time speaking in front of an audience. However, I realized that the presentation is much more enjoyable than any other presentation I have had as it is a project that me and my group has been passionately working towards. The merge request that I opened was a culmination of a lot of hours in learning the codebase, perl and debugging. I also really enjoyed the presentations this week. There were two projects that really stood out to me freeCodeCamp and Gitlab. A bit off topic, but recently I had a conversation with a friend who is a software engineer working on government projects, and he educated me on the need for a lot of disadvantaged communities to receive technology literacy and that he wanted to bridge this gap. freeCodeCamp seems to be align with this ideal in making education accessible for those that seek it. Programming is an extremely useful tool to learn and refine. Free, valid coding courses are the basis to bridge this gap in technological literacy. Gitlab also piqued my interest, as I have really only worked with Github before. The ability to control every aspect of version control and ci/cd and the open source nature could mean that it is better and more ethical than GitHub. The arguments made by the group was especially compelling in that Gitlab is more secure in protecting proprietary data.

Week 14 - Class Discussion

Open Source Cola

The open source initative that I focused on in collecting the resources and information for was OpenCola. OpenCola itself is not an extremely large movement, rather it was to promote an Open Source Projects business. However, I do believe the making of cola recipe avalilble to general public is a movement that plays into a grander intiative which aims to prevent the commercialization of foods. Many banks and large companies own restaurants and food chains, which gatekeep the recipes they have to their individual company or trade. The creation of OpenCola is to protest against Coca-cola guarding their secret recipe in providing publicly avalilble recipes online. I think that this project is easily done, and would love to see a mass production of this product made through fundraisers. OpenCola was given out initially to promote free software company Opencola, but is also used to described the OpenCola movement.

Week 13 - The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

My favorite quote that I initially voted for I think was that “Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).” I think the class discussion aligned with the reasons that I had in this being my favorite quote. Most of my time programming is creating the minimally viable product in which it works but it is missing my feature. Then it is a matter of refactoring and rewriting all my code. I often find myself refactoring code so that it could be reused in other aspects. I think the main reason why refactoring is central in good development is that nobody can think of all the test cases in the first version they produce. This is because often times when the problem is complex enough, you only really think about certain design choices after the first version is done. I still remember during Professor Klukowska’s data structure class where she stated that if a program works the first time, she is more concerned than if it were to break. This

Week 12 - Tidepool

Tidepool and Christopher

Christopher Snider provided great insights into the mission of Tidepool in providing accessible technology to monitor necessary vitals for sugar content. I think the largest difference in Christopher’s mention of open source by Tidepool vs open source by Enterprise ultimately comes down to the people that the software and open source benefits. In my opinion, tradtional enterprise version of open source benefits from going to market faster than if were to develop the product completely internally. The intent is not of a higher moral goal other than to benefit the institution itself.Tidepool centers around transparency and providing diabetes technology to those that deal with the illness. It is also much more transparent in all its development practices and procedures as it is valilble. Therefore Tidepool is more so aimed at benefitting the general public, which better supports the free and open source movement idea of creating software ultimately to help people. Business models at insitutions emphasize profits and saving costs as opposed to benefitting everyone. In enterprise use, the benefits of the general public often come second to the opinions of investors and shareholders.

Week 11 - Project Update 3/Videos

Videos

I think that it is very interesting that numerous companies have found success in building businesses on open-source models, which shows that there is viability beyond billion-dollar benchmarks as discussed in “Lessons Learned from Open Source in Business”. Sustainability concerns are my automatic thoughts when thinking open source in business, due to the reliance on volunteer labor. The exploration of more sustainable models beyond the mentioned “tip jar” approaches centers around community engagement and labor mobility, emphasizing reciprocal benefits in the video. I think that the main importance of these sustainable projects is the value in innovation and longevity.

Week 10 - Project Update 2

Programming Contributions and Project

I have been currently working on my group project this week. Me and my group have established a system in which we are trying to claim a lot of issues that we would be able to resolve. Although we have not had an organized meetup this week, we do message a lot about the project in our groups. I have also been reviewing material on Perl scripting, which I have done before in my previous internship at Franklin Templeton. A lot of the scripts used for loading data onto SQL databases at my old job was done in Perl scripting. Perl is a bit different than other scripting languages in the flexibility of Perl’s diction.

Week 8 - Project Update 1

Programming Contributions and Project

I have been currently working on my group project throughout the week. Previous to this week I had to set up the environment where I could then properly start contributing. Contributing to this project has been relatively of ease. Open Food Facts has a method set up in claiming issues, where you have to leave a message on github and on Slack. I recently claimed an issue regarding the website and how certain items come up in terms of describing the weight and characteristics. I have been trying to tackle it in the past few days. I have been communicating some of the developers on the team in the best fixes. It is also related to another issue that I think that I will also claim as well as I think its correlated.

Week 7 - Free/open source

Free/open source

I think the start of free and open-source software was really about people wanting to share and improve software together. People like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds were vital in making this happen. I think its interesting that both are controversial figures to some extent. Linus is not as controversial as Richard Stallman, but I think these two figures show the dichotomy of the open source community. It shows that anyone of any background can contribute and be impactful to open source. Granted, the two are essentially geniuses in computer science and programming.

Week 6 - Open Source Projects

Different projects

I’ve explored several intriguing projects, but Open Food Facts stands out for its mission to make food transparency universal. I’m most excited about contributing to a project that has a direct impact on consumer health and well-being. The idea of using my skills to help expand the database and improve the accuracy of nutritional information is motivating. to me and this project aligns with my interests in data analysis. I think I can truly have an impact contributing to this project

Week 5 - Video and Contributions Response

Video Response

Delving into Red Hat’s Open Source Stories, particularly those focused on agriculture and technology, was genuinely intriguing for me. As a computer science student, it’s easy to get engrossed in developing technology that companies would use, yet these segments overall showed me ways open source development can create true technology that would better the world without the corporate monetization and distribution of such technology. I don’t really think about ways I could change the world with development, I have always felt I lack those skills to really change the world in which it matters.

Week 4 - browser extension

Group Work

My group created an ad-blocker web extension that is centered around productivity. I think that implementing the back-end for this web extension was a bit difficult as there was limitations regarding how the text on the page would be blocked. I found that my group has been very open to communication and working together to achieve a functional prototype, which features work. Therefore, I found my work with my team members very smooth and innovative.

Week 3 - git

Git

The git exercises were a great refresher into git commands, as I think it covers important functionality. I had intially ran into some issues that delayed my progress as with SSH it required me to setup a key for github, which I had not previously done. Previously, I had always used HTTP because it is easier to directly clone the repository into VSCode. I have used ssh during my past internships before and such.

Week 2 - Code of Conduct

Code of Conduct

I think that the code of conduct is extremely important for an open source project in particular because it outlines the standards of the project. I would not want to work on a project that does not have a Code of Conduct unless it is a project that is closed source and between people I trust. If there is no code of conduct, there is no standard for the community to behave, which could mean that the members of the community may not have moral integrity. If there is no consequence to friendliness and openness, the progress on the project could be impended by a community that does not work in collaboration. I also think that the Code of Conduct often labels very bare minimums in that the rules could be easily followed. Many code of conducts discuss being kind and disavow behaviors that are discriminatory. These type of moral rules I think can be easily followed by choice.

Week 1 - Open Source

Open Source

I think that open source is something I find strictly unique to software development. I think of it as people work together to achieve a goal to provide accessible or needed technology to the public for the public good. I think that it is noble in idea and in practice, as it is contributing to something that benefits not the individual but the public. I think that open source advantage is that more people can contribute to the project, this would allow for more progress to be made and more diverse views and perspective for it. I think other advantages is that it allows technology to be accessible for all. Closed source has the advantage where proprietary data or sensitive information could not be leaked.